Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Playing with photos

Even though I've worked with Photoshop on basically a daily basis for the past eight years, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of learning what it can do. It is seriously the coolest program ever.

I've professed my love for The Pioneer Woman before, but I only recently downloaded her Photoshop action set (because it's only been recently that I've had a computer that had a decent version of Photoshop).

It was overcast today, so I thought I would take some photos when I got home from work/picking the kids up from daycare. I really need to get the manual out, or read Understanding Exposure at the very least, and learn all the nifty things my camera (Canon Xti) can do.

After reading through a few tutorials on i heart faces, I practiced a little. I took photos of some of the flowers outside our house because 1) they're pretty and 2) they don't move.

The first photo in each group is SOOC. The second one is after running a few PW actions in Photoshop (namely boost and warmer, both toned down in opacity. Then I also adjusted the levels slightly to get it to how I liked it.)

The clematis climbing over a decorative fence along the side of our house:

It's not a huge difference, but just enough to give it a bit more life.

Same fence, different orientation.

Dahlia in a pot on our front steps.

I can tell the biggest difference in the dahlia photo. The colors just pop a lot more. Of course, if I would have been thinking, I would have written down what settings I had my camera on. I know it was on AV mode for the first two and macro mode for the last one. There's just so much to learn!